Lucky

I’m discovering that the best theoretical writing on fluidity / postnationalism is being done by scholars of Basque literature. And believe me, I’ve looked everywhere. Since Zygmunt Bauman’s death, I’ve done nothing but look. And until I got into the Basques, all I found were the inane bleatings about how the erosion of the nation-state is about to bring immediate liberation and extreme wonderfulness to the oh-pressed.

I want to credit myself with an inhuman intuition and an intellectual potency of uncommon proportions and claim that I was drawn to the Basque studies because I intuited that the peculiar nature of Euskadi as a nation without borders that is not a third or second-world country positions it perfectly as a place where insights can be generated.

But that’s not even remotely true. This was nothing but a fluke.

Of course, now I’d have to start making an argument that the tiny Basque Country nobody knows about is a source of important ideas about fluidity, and nobody will want to hear it. But screw that. I’m having fun.

For now, I’m just happy somebody is at least grappling with the issue. Literary criticism on this subject is impoverished to the point of producing nothing Slate-type thinking laden with academic jargon. Look at the book a reader linked earlier today. It’s a retelling of Graeber’s “debt is bad; nobody is obligated to repay it” idea and applying in to a couple of novels. That’s the extent of the scholarship on crisis literature. I mean, I’m happy that somebody at least is noticing the crisis literature. But can you at least try to do something but reproduce childish slogans? Jeez.

Now she’ll get the MLA prize and I won’t even though my book is a million times better. And it’s not only because I’m not in a hegemonic field. It’s because I’m not ideologically circumscribed by the PC mantras.